


We Didn't Get Christmas

by FireflysLove



Series: Maybe Baby [6]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Christmas, F/F, F/M, Female Steve Rogers, Gender or Sex Swap, Genderbending, Is Married To Bucky Barnes, Multi, Winter Soldier!Peggy, and they do the do with Peggy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-08
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-02-28 15:19:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2737520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FireflysLove/pseuds/FireflysLove
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Christmas edition of Maybe Baby. All events are contained within this 'verse, but are not directly related to each other.</p>
<p>The violence warning is for the second fic/chapter. It involves semi-graphic depictions of the Winter Soldier (Peggy) killing her Hydra handlers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Snowy Light

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The painful sexy one

London at night was something to behold, the fairy lights strung between buildings, trees in windows, wreaths on doors. Children ran home through softly falling snow, laughing as they went.

It didn’t seem strange to Peggy that this was the London of her childhood, unscarred by the Blitz, her people home and whole. She was just _here_ , and it seemed _right_ , and that’s all that mattered.

The air was just cold enough to be nippy, but not enough to make her want to go inside. She wasn’t wearing gloves, but she didn’t really need them anyway. Both her hands were being held, Steve on her right, Bucky on her left. No one on the street looked at them… but then again, there wasn’t anyone else on the street. It was just the three of them, in a night lit by the butter light of candlesticks, chasing snowflakes off the bricks.

She turned to say something to Steve, but it was quickly forgotten as the taller woman captured her lips in a gentle kiss. Her hands came up to stroke the sides of Peggy’s face, and Peggy used her free hand to pull the pins out of the blonde hair. They scattered on the floor, pinging against the wide pine boards. Bucky, suddenly a strong presence against her back, removed the pins from her own hair, albeit in a much more sedate manner.

Steve pulled back for a moment to look Peggy in the eyes, and then pressed her lips to the brunette’s forehead. Lips fastened themselves below her ear. Peggy gasped, and curled back into Bucky’s strong grasp. He walked all three of them back until his knees hit a chair, and he sat down in it. He brought Peggy down into his lap with him, Steve’s hands still on her face. They leaned to her left and kissed over her shoulder while Bucky’s hands made quick work of the buttons of Peggy’s blouse.

Her own hands seemed to have a mind of their own, flitting up to the hem of Steve’s shirt and sliding under it. The skin underneath was creamy smooth, and jumped under her fingertips as they brushed across it. The blonde’s head turned away from Bucky’s face, and into Peggy’s neck, nipping at it. He finished unbuttoning her shirt, and pulled it off her shoulders, which forced her hands away from Steve’s stomach just long enough to get it off and somewhere else. Meanwhile, Steve’s own shirt disappeared, and Peggy was left staring at an expanse of skin nearly the same color as the snow outside. The two of them moved in synchronization, Bucky lifting Peggy’s hips off his own as Steve hooked her fingers in the waistband of Peggy’s skirt and stockings and pulled them off.

The mattress had a featherbed topper, and it nearly engulfed Peggy as she rolled out from under the body over her. The room smelled of pine and fir and the only light in was from the tree in the corner, strewn with fairy lights, glass balls, and garlands. A mouth nibbled its way across her collarbone, and she grasped the hair of the head it was attached to.

She lost track of whose limbs belonged to who as they moved around each other. Someone brushed their fingers across the inside of her thigh, and she threw her head back against the shoulder of the person behind her, and a glance of dark hair told her it was Bucky. That left Steve between her legs, raising matching marks on the point of each hipbone. Lit by the twinkling light of the fairy lights, it was hard to make out the bright blue of her eyes from the wide expanse of her pupils as she looked up at Peggy.

She smirked and moved her head down. Bucky’s arms came around Peggy’s chest and held her to him despite her attempts to writhe off the bed. A slow burn started low in her stomach, and slowly spiraled out into her arms and legs. The exact moment it hit her toes, she turned her head into Bucky’s neck and cried out. The fairy lights blinked out, and everything went black.

 

* * *

 

Peggy wakes up panting, sweat soaked, and more than a little disoriented. She pauses for a moment, and takes stock of her situation. Her apartment, Brooklyn, New York. Her flatmate is sleeping in the other bedroom. Early morning, December 25, 1949. Steve and Bucky are dead.

She closes her eyes for a few moments, tears prickling hot behind her lids.

It’s not the first Christmas she hasn’t had them, of course. But the two she had them for were the best two Christmases of her life. Somehow the Commandoes were always in base camp on Christmas day. She had suspected that Steve had something to do with that.

She rises, legs still slightly gelatinous after what had, apparently, been a real orgasm, and walks to her dresser. She quietly opens the top drawer, moves aside stacks of underthings, and withdraws a small wooden box. She returns to the bed, and flicks on the lamp on her nightstand.

The first thing she withdraws from the box is the floral headscarf that Steve wore the night Peggy told Bucky that Steve jumped on a grenade. A small notebook that Bucky had given her for Christmas ’44. A picture of the three of them that someone had taken and slid under her door. She suspected Dugan, but never said anything. A stack of letters both of them had written to her while they were on missions. They’re all slightly splotched from 5 years of tear marks, so what’s one more night of dampness dripping off Peggy’s cheeks going to do?

Finally, at the bottom of the stack, a necklace.

It had been her mother’s, and while she was alive, it contained pictures of Peggy and her brother Harrison. Those two pictures now resided in a small frame on Peggy’s dresser, and the locket held pictures of Steve, back in her skinny days, and Bucky, pulled from the newspaper. She hangs it around her neck, and puts things back in the box, then the box in the drawer. If they couldn’t be here with her for Christmas, they could at least be close to her heart.

She flicks off the light and goes back to sleep.

Sleep and Christmas in London.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If I'm thanking you for making it more painful, you know who you are. 
> 
> I was only planning to write the one Christmas fic... but I have two other ideas, neither of which cause Peggy to cry!


	2. Catch the Light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Winter Soldier at Christmas.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is not the fluffy fic I had intended to write. In fact, this is basically the opposite of fluffy. Winter (Peggy) does some very violent and slightly graphic killing (of Hydra agents).
> 
> I am so, so sorry Peggy. I truly am.

_Somewhere in Russia, December 1991_

They pull her into the warehouse, blood, mud, and other things soaked into her clothing.

“Stay,” one of them says. She assigns him the designation One.

“Get it out of those things. And burn them,” another (Two) says.

Quick cuts with a knife divest her of her garments. It strikes her skin, but she makes no other movement than to hiss at the handler. He ignores her.

“Get in there,” One says, pointing to a white-walled stall.

She steps into it, and Two locks her mismatched wrists behind her back with heavy duty handcuffs. He steps out, and One turns on a hose. He aims it at her, and she staggers under the sudden freezing onslaught. Two returns with a brush and scrubs roughly at her, rough bristles opening half-healed wounds on her torso. She hisses again, and lunges, but the stream is turned into her face, and she is forced back.

“We should cut its hair,” Two says.

“The Commandant said no unnecessary modifications without his direct approval. The Asset may need its hair to blend in sometime,” One replies.

The water turns off and Two steps into the stall with a bucket of industrial cleaner.

“Do not move,” he says. “Or you know what will happen.”

She stands still while he dumps it over her head. The caustic fluid pours into the newly open wounds, and it takes all of her programming not to snap the man’s neck. The hose is turned back on, and she is rinsed off.

“Put it in the dryer,” One says. “And comb its hair.”

Two pokes her in the back until she exits the stall and into another. He takes off the cuffs, and flicks a switch on the wall. Fans from above blast warm air at her. She has been shivering, one reflex they haven’t been able to program out of her. Two comes at her with a comb, and she snatches it from his hand with a growl. She yanks it through her hair with savage tugs, but probably not as hard as Two would have.

As soon as she is dry, she is whisked into different clothing.

“Into the chair,” One says.

She obeys.

“Sleep.”

She obeys.

 

* * *

 

They, the greater They, not One and Two, have called her the Asset for many years. She has heard herself called the Winter Soldier, a ghost, mostly just screams. She knows she had another designation before, but she does not remember before.

She calls herself Winter.

 

* * *

 

Winter wakes.

No one is around her. The machine beside her is silent as well. She rises from the chair and onto her bare feet. Silent as snow, she walks away from it. The sudden sound of laughter sounds from far off in the warehouse.

Winter seizes a knife from a crate.

Her handlers, four of them total, are in a brightly lit room. There are playing cards on the table. Winter remembers playing cards.

They never see her coming. One moment they are laughing, the next she is in the door.

“What the fuck?” One says. “Did you restrain it?”

“I thought you did!” Two shouts.

“Go back to the chair!” A third orders her. She has not seen this man before. Her programming does not recognize his authority.

He dies first, the knife a quivering hilt in his gurgling throat. She does not need a weapon, of course. She _is_ a weapon. The fourth man is thrown through the wall, smashing into a crate on the other side, and sliding down it with a bloody streak left behind.

Two grabs a device from his belt and approaches her with it.

An electric crackling fills the room. He strikes her in the midsection, but miscalculates the angle. And they dressed her in tactical gear. Her right hand seizes his wrist, and her left his shoulder. Relieving him of the arm, she shoves him to the side and approaches One.

They haven’t programmed her to be sadistic. She is a weapon, made only to kill efficiently and without feeling.

But she takes her time with One.

 

* * *

 

She strips out of the tactical gear, now just as soaked with blood as the previous set had been. Winter knows where they keep the spares. She goes there, and yanks the lock off with her left hand. As if a flimsy padlock could have kept her out. There is one set of gear left. She dresses in layers of thermal clothing, then pulls it on over. Tugging a fur hat over her head, and a scarf around her lower face, she turns away from the chest. Another next to it serves as armory.

The cold outside is bitter, but Winter does not notice it.

She walks until the sun rises, then pauses as hunger rumbles through her torso. An unfortunate small animal becomes her meal.

Winter finds a road when the sun is directly overhead. She follows it as clouds begin to move in. Miles later, snow begins to fall lightly. When it gets too thick to see, Winter turns off the road and into an abandoned shack. She eats the remainder of the animal and waits out the night.

The next day is clear as a bell.

The color of the sky seems familiar somehow. That _particular_ shade of crystal blue. Flashes of a face in her mind, but then they are gone.

Winter walks on.

She reaches a small town at sunset, and keeps to the shadows. It would not do for her to be seen. Brightly colored lights are strung across buildings and trees. Those lights meant something to her once, but not anymore.

Approaching a window on a house, she peers in. A family sits around an evergreen tree strung with similar lights and glass balls. There are patterned boxes tied with ribbon underneath it.

 

* * *

 

She stays in the town for nearly a week, scavenging from small rodent life, refuse, and melting snow for her water. The arm begins to ache abominably, and she knows she will have to go back in. She is contemplating the best route back to a facility when a small voice speaks.

“Hello there, miss.”

Her head snaps around, and she sees a small child with bright red hair standing there.

“Go away,” she snaps.

“You look cold, miss,” the girl says.

“Child, leave,” she orders, voice rusty from disuse.

“You can have some cookies if you want. Mrs. K says they’re for Santa, but I don’t think he would mind if you had some,” the girl says, proffering a cookie in a mittened hand.

Winter steps forward and snatches it out of the girl’s hand, shoves it in her mouth, and eats it quickly. It is sweet. Winter remembers sweet.

“Who are you, miss?” the girl asks.

“I am… I am no one,” Winter says.

“I’m Natalia. This is an orphanage. We take in people who don’t have anywhere to go,” the girl says.

“I do not think that you want me around, Natalia,” Winter says.

“Are you dangerous?” Natalia asks.

“Very,” Winter replies.

Light suddenly spills on the snow as a door opens.

“Natalia, come back inside at once,” a stern voice orders. Then the woman sees Winter. “What are you doing here?” she hisses. “Get back to the facility at once.”

Winter does not know this woman, but something in her programming recognizes the crone’s authority.

She nods curtly, and turns to Natalia, who is staring up at her with wide eyes.

“Goodbye Natalia. May life be kinder to you than it was to me,” she says, then walks off into the falling snow, disappearing from sight.

Natalia turns back to her caretaker. “Who was that, Mrs. K?” she asks.

“No one of your concern, Natalia. Now come inside. You must get some sleep. There are people coming here to see you and give you a nice present tomorrow,” Mrs. K says.

“Who’s coming?” Natalia asks with bright eyes as she steps into the hall. Tomorrow was a very important day to Natalia. It was Christmas, and more importantly, her fourth birthday.

“Nice men from a new home for you!” Mrs. K says.

“Where?” Natalia asks.

“It’s called the Red Room.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have absolutely no idea when Nat's birthday is. I picked Christmas because Natalia/Natalie/Natasha means "Christmas day". 
> 
> I promise there will be Steve, Bucky, superbabies, and maybe even a post-WS!Peggy in this fic's near future.


	3. Shining Bright

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peggy gets a happy Christmas. (And still cries)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Peeling myself away from Dragon Age long enough to write fic is difficult. 
> 
> This is what the future of Maybe Baby looks like. Peggy coming in from the cold and being with Steve and Bucky. Jamie (Steve and Bucky's son) is particularly fond of her.

_December 2014_

* * *

 

The lights on the tree glittered through her squinted eyes.

She knew she had an open invitation to come into the apartment whenever she wanted, but it still didn’t feel right to walk in. So she was here, on the window, outside. The fact that she was nearly eighty stories up didn’t bother her. The arm gave her good enough anchoring in the side of the building that she wasn’t going to fall off.

The girls run around, making a mess of the popcorn that Steve was trying to get them to string. Jamie toddles toward the tree, his mother snatching him before he can eat the single string of popcorn that they have managed to assemble.

She is so engrossed in the activities that she doesn’t notice the window next to her head sliding open.

“Hi, Peggy,” Bucky says. “Isn’t it a bit cold out there?”

“It’s a bit nippy,” she replies.

“Want to come in? I just put on water for tea,” he says.

“I… don’t want to intrude,” Peggy says.

Bucky snorts. “You’d hardly be interrupting. You’re probably going to have to entertain Jamie and keep him out of the popcorn,” he says.

“Well… all right,” Peggy says. She swings in through the window and lands in the kitchen just as the kettle starts whistling.

“What are you doing in there?” Steve calls from the living room.

“Bringing in stray puppies,” Bucky calls back.

“What?” she replies.

“I found a babysitter for Jamie,” he says, pouring the steaming water into three mugs. To Peggy he asks, “Three sugars, splash of milk?”

“Yes,” she says.

Steve comes into the room with a quizzical expression on her face, which quickly softens as she sees Peggy leaning against the refrigerator.

“Hi!” she says.

Peggy cracks a smile. “Happy Christmas.”

 

* * *

 

A few days later, Peggy wakes to bouncing on the mattress. Small legs beat at hers, and she catches Maggie before the girl can kick her father in the head.

“It’s Christmas!” Maggie shouts. Her siblings echo with a chorus of “Christmas!”

“Presents!” Jamie says.

“What time is it?” Bucky groans.

“Half six,” Peggy answers, after swiveling her head to look at the clock.

“Go back to bed you little rascals,” he says.

“But Mommy’s already been up for a whole hour, and she said we could come in at 6:30!” Sarah says.

“Your mother is a morning person, and it’s awful,” Bucky says. “But seeing as it _is_ Christmas, I guess we can get out of bed.”

This is met with three cheers.

The tree is a bright shining thing in the center of the living room. Steve is sitting on the couch sipping a steaming cup of coffee.

“Aren’t you opening presents with the rest of your team?” Peggy asks.

“We’re doing the kids’ presents now, and the adults are meeting up later to open theirs. But we do have stockings for us to open now,” Steve replies.

Bucky goes to the mantle and pulls down the children’s stockings, handing them to them. He also extracts three slightly larger ones, and brings them back to the couch.

“Here,” he says, handing a dark green one to Peggy.

“You got me a stocking?” she asks.

“Of course,” Steve says. “You’re part of our family now, after all.”

Tears threaten at the corner of Peggy’s eyes, and Steve sets aside her own stocking to pull Peggy into a hug.

 

* * *

 

Later, after all the festivities are held, eggnog drunk, presents opened, carols sung, and children put to bed, Peggy sits in the living room. The tree is going to be gone tomorrow, but for now it remains lit.

She considers Christmases past, and realizes she hasn’t had a truly joyful one since the winter of 1944.

But the future looks bright.

She stays.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sarah and Maggie have just turned 3 (their birthday is December 21) and Jamie is 17 months old, if you're wondering.

**Author's Note:**

> My Tumblr: [FireflysLove](http://fireflyslove.tumblr.com/)


End file.
